


Two of Every Kind

by IndigoStarblaster



Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Don’t copy to another site, Female Crowley (Good Omens), The Flood - Freeform, some readers may find this a little dark
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-12
Updated: 2019-11-12
Packaged: 2021-01-29 04:06:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,362
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21403912
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/IndigoStarblaster/pseuds/IndigoStarblaster
Summary: In 3004 BC, Crowley was under no delusion that she would be able to save all of them. But she was going to thwart the will of Heaven as hard as her demonic self could manage.
Relationships: Aziraphale & Crowley (Good Omens)
Comments: 7
Kudos: 25





	Two of Every Kind

**Author's Note:**

> I have been chipping away at so many WIPs, but this is the first fic I have managed to finish in over four years. Many, many thanks to Snapjack for beta, to the Internet for snippets about prehistoric Mesopotamia, and to the Good Omens fandom for all the wonderful works that have tempted me to try my own hand at this stuff once again. Hope you all find this a worthy contribution!

_ 3004 BC _

“They say the next rain will last many days.”

Crowley turned, distracted for a moment from watching Noah and his sons load the ark. “What’s that?”

“They say the next rain will last many days,” Kakummi repeated. “What do you think, Annu?” She looked worried. Crowley thought she had good reason to be. Kakummi was recently widowed and had five children, ranging in age from her eldest daughter, who was twelve, to the infant presently nursing at her breast with hungry smacking sounds. Kakummi spent long days gleaning the fields for not quite enough grain to feed them all, and during the last rains the river had shifted, the banks crumbling so that suddenly their little hut was perilously close to the water’s edge. Another hard rain would likely leave them homeless as well as perpetually hungry.

“Yeah, maybe. You could try...” Crowley’s voice trailed off. There was nothing to try. When Noah first started building the ark, during the hottest and driest season in living memory, everyone had mocked him. But the ark was long finished, and the skies had been darkening for days; everyone could feel the storm coming. Noah’s family was the only one in the whole God-damned valley that had any chance at all.

Kakummi nodded. “My late husband’s cousin has a bit of pasture on higher ground, for his goats. Perhaps he will let us build a shelter there, at least until the rains pass. We are family, after all.” Kakummi touched Crowley’s arm. “You can come with us, if you have need, Annu.”

That was quite the offer. Crowley-aka-Annu sashayed around the village in a female body and without father or husband, the local prostitute. (That was no big deal as far as Crowley was concerned; tempting the local priests and patriarchs was an easy way to make quota when she was in the mood, and prospective customers simply found themselves changing their minds when she wasn’t.) It couldn’t be good for Kakummi’s reputation to be seen with Crowley, but that was Kakummi, kind to everyone for no reason at all.

“Thanks,” Crowley said at last. “But it’s...it’s not going to be enough. The next storm is going to flood even the higher ground. I heard.”

Kakummi sighed. “As God wills it, then.” She shifted the baby up to her shoulder for burping. That baby really was the cutest little thing, rubbing her sleepy face against Kakummi’s shoulder, a fold of Kakummi’s veil clutched in her tiny, perfect fist.

Shit. “Kakummi. Let’s go inside for a bit. Bring in the kids.” 

Kakummi looked at Crowley questioningly, but then nodded, calling in her older children, who had been pounding grain for the evening meal or playing nearby. The hut was simple, sleeping mats piled against one wall and a few pots against another. 

Crowley looked at the little family gathered there, and thought about how she’d already watched Noah and his sons loading on all kinds of species — hares, camels, goats, scorpions, spiders. Duplicates would almost certainly be turned away. Pointed at the two eldest children. “You two are pandas.”

One of them wrinkled her nose in confusion. “What’s a panda?”

Crowley bent down to her. “You are.” She drew on her demonic power with a snap, and immediately two middling-sized pandas appeared in front of her.

(They weren’t actually pandas. If this worked, Crowley would be doing it many more times tonight, so she had to be sparing with her powers, to attract as little notice as possible.)

Crowley looked them over critically. Good enough to fool even supernatural beings if they weren’t paying too much attention. Turned to the next two. “You two are wombats.” Huh — she had thought vaguely that wombats were a type of bat, but apparently they actually looked like small furry pigs. Kakummi and the baby she turned into Japanese macaques, the little one clinging to the bigger one’s back. 

“Follow me, and only make panda, wombat or monkey noises.” It was nerve-wracking, making their way through the village to the outskirts where Noah had built his ark — pandas and wombats were _not_ built for speed, though macaque-Kakummi did all right — but they got there. “Hey, Japheth. More for you, here.”

Noah’s youngest son, a gawky teenager with a good heart (if not too bright), turned and blushed at being greeted by the village prostitute. “Um, uh—“ then frowned in confusion. “What are they? I’ve never seen them before.”

Crowley shrugged. “Dunno. Two of every unclean animal, though, right? I wouldn’t eat ‘em, anyway.”

“Yes, right. Ok, well. Thanks.” Gently shepherded them up the gangplank and into one of the many stalls.

Crowley turned away. She was under no delusion that she would be able to save all of them. But she was going to thwart the will of Heaven as hard as her demonic self could manage.

*

This whole sorry business wasn’t Arizaphale’s idea, and he had no specific role to play. He wasn’t even cc’d on implementation updates. Still, this was the region he was posted to, and Aziraphale felt that it was his duty to bear witness to its destruction. It was literally the least he could do.

So Aziraphale had been watching for a while now, and was perplexed. Noah and his sons had been gathering up the animals for days and had at most hours left — the cloud cover was so thick no one could tell if it was day or night, and static electricity sizzled in the air, clearly ready to discharge in a spectacular lightning storm any minute — but there seemed to be no end to the sheer _volume_ of animals going up that gangplank. Aziraphale had no idea that the valley teemed with so much wildlife. Even more puzzling, the majority of the animals weren’t, as far as he knew, native to the area (though they were certainly there now, and therefore in need of collection). And then there was the fact that the line of animals wound through the village but there didn’t seem to be any beaters up in the wooded hillsides beyond. Rather, they seemed to be streaming up from within the village itself. 

Well. Aziraphale decided there would be no harm in looking into the matter. 

As he walked along the line back into the village, he noted that the animals were remarkably well-behaved, even though they were a mix of predator and prey species and none of Noah’s family was here to manage the queue. At the very end, he saw two echidnas amble out of a hut and join the line. Very odd indeed. He went up to the hut, knocked gingerly, stepped inside, and pressed his lips together in consternation. He should have known. “Crowley, what on earth are you doing?” 

The demon was surrounded by families, human families. Aziraphale recognized them as the poorest of the poor, the ones who were already suffering from the heavy rains that had fallen earlier in the season, who had nowhere to go as their huts disintegrated and their meagre patches of land flooded — not just from this village, but all the neighbouring ones within a half-day’s walk. The humans were afraid and hopeful, both; the demon looked exhausted but she still glared defiantly at Aziraphale’s intrusion. 

“Oh, look, two armadillos disguised as humans. Let me just fix that.” She snapped her fingers, and two of the toddlers nearest her shrank down and took on scales. “Don’t forget, your mum and dad are echidnas now.” They scampered out, and a couple still in their teens, clutching their newborn, took their place. “Three of you. Great. You, you can be—“ Crowley swayed. 

Aziraphale hurried forward, unthinking. Caught Crowley (so thin in his arms, barely any weight to her at all) and lowered her to sit on the dirt floor, knelt beside her. Looked around at those desperate, hopeful faces, and thought for a moment. “Have there been any koalas yet?” he asked softly. 

Crowley looked at him for a long moment, eyes glimmering gold in the dimness of the hut. “Don’t think so.”

“Well, then.” Aziraphale made the tiniest of gestures, and smiled at the two koalas that were suddenly before him. “Your little one is safe in your pouch; no one should notice. Go on.” 

As they left, more humans moved in, knelt down in front of angel and demon, and joined the line to the ark as squirrels, kangaroos, black-footed ferrets. After a few minutes, Crowley recovered a bit and joined Aziraphale in casting spell after spell, taking turns. They bickered softly about whether North American lynxes were different enough from the native wildcats that Noah would be willing to recognize them as a different species, whether species that were technically extinct could still serve. A few times, Aziraphale closed his eyes to focus his mind on the ark, expanding its insides several times over to accommodate the additional passengers they were creating. At some point, the only lamp ran out of oil, but Aziraphale kept it burning anyway with half a thought, between one transformation and the next.

All too soon, a flash of lightning, the crack of thunder, followed immediately by the heavy patter of rain, announced the beginning of the end. Aziraphale and Crowley tried to work faster as water started trickling into the hut from the doorway, dripping through the roof, seeping up from the ground, turning the dirt floor into mud. Some of the humans glanced at each other, silently pushed forward their eldest children — the ones old enough to survive on their own if they had to, just one or two per family — and started slipping out of the hut once they had seen them change, holding their other children close as they left. Aziraphale and Crowley made the children before them into lyrebirds, wallabies, dingoes. Skinks, tomtits, pheasants. Sika deer, salamanders, short-tailed bats.

One of the remaining adult humans went to the door of the hut, looked out for a moment, and came back to Aziraphale and Crowley, kneeling beside them. “Ham and Japheth are coming into the village, perhaps to gather the last of the animals. Noah is starting to nail boards across the ark’s door,” she said quietly.

“Oh, dear,” said Aziraphale, looking around. There were still so many in the hut, young and old, they couldn’t possibly... but they were leaving. A few met his eyes resignedly as they turned to go; most simply left, in twos and threes, hunkering down against the pouring rain. Soon enough, angel and demon were sitting alone in ankle-deep mud in the middle of the hut. 

*

“How...how many do you think—“ Aziraphale began. They had been sitting for long enough to see the trickle of water coming into the hut turn into a rivulet, a stream. To sink noticeably deeper into the mud. For some reason, though, he didn’t want to leave quite yet. 

Crowley shrugged. “I did maybe a thousand before you showed up. I think you and me did another thousand after that?”

“Oh. That’s not so bad—“

“Half a million humans live in this valley, angel,” Crowley said tiredly. “Another two million live just beyond, well within the Flood zone if they haven’t left yet. Two thousand is a rounding error.” She had known before she started it wouldn’t make a difference, not really.

There was nothing Aziraphale could say to that.

Eventually Crowley sighed, then stood and stretched, cracking her back, miracle-ing the mud off her robes with a brush of her fingers. “I need to be off. Don’t want to get discorporated by the Flood. You?”

“Yes, soon.” It was dark enough that Aziraphale would be able to manifest his wings and fly to safety, once he’d walked out past the village a bit. “Crowley? Even if we couldn’t save that many, for you to even try was really very good of—“

“Don’t.” Crowley cut Aziraphale off. “I wasn’t doing it to be _good_. I hate good. I was doing it because it’s my job to oppose all of Heaven’s works.” She paused. “Are you going to get in trouble? Thwarting the will of God.”

“I’ve done no such thing. I haven’t lifted a finger against the Flood.” Possibly that came out a little bitter; Aziraphale tried to soften his tone. “I just created some harmless illusions to entertain the locals during a difficult time. And made sure that Noah had enough room for all the animals that he chose, entirely of his own free will, to bring on board the ark. The two activities are completely unconnected.”

Crowley snorted. “So I did a bad thing and you did a good thing, and they just happened to be the same thing?”

“Yes,” Aziraphale said primly. “And...and thank you.” At Crowley’s raised eyebrow, Aziraphale added reluctantly, “For doing a bad thing that...that let me finally do something good in this wretched circumstance.”

Crowley couldn’t help just looking at Aziraphale, this angel who was so wholly unlike the other denizens of Heaven, and clearly the best of them at the same time. Eventually realized she’d been staring silently at Aziraphale a little too long, and cleared her throat. “Right. Well. See you when I see you, angel.” Went to and out the doorway, swearing softly at the God-blessed rain.

Aziraphale sat for just a little longer. It was going to be a miserably wet walk to the edge of the village, and then a miserably _ cold _ wet flight, forty days and forty nights aloft at a minimum. Just at that moment, though, he felt strangely warm. Perhaps it was the way that he and Crowley, that most undemonic of demons, had worked together. The ease and flow of it — Aziraphale couldn’t remember the last time he felt that. Perhaps it was the way Crowley had looked at him, at the end.

Well. Aziraphale stood abruptly, sloshed through the knee-deep mud to the doorway. It was pitch black outside, an absolute darkness that was matched inside the hut when Aziraphale finally let the lamp go out. There was no one to notice when he, too, stepped out the doorway, and was gone.

THE END


End file.
